I celebrated my thru-hike of the AT as part of an important birthday in 2000. Since then I have written and thought about what this experience of hiking over 2,000 miles might tell me about my day job in various leadership roles in large organisations.

The simplicity of Trail life is reassuring and allows quiet contemplation about people and organisations.

In this blog I seek to make a link between the lessons I learned from long-distance hiking and what this might tell me about leadership. Your comments and reflections are welcome.

Strategy, planning and execution

We need a shared and meaningful long term objective - in this case, Katahdin - which sustains us through difficult and challenging times. Put simply, the objective is the mountain.

We need a tactical and strategic outlook - the former to get us through each day in good shape, the latter to focus on our objective, even when it’s more than 2,000 miles away.